Funny Farm

Play for Today: Funny Farm

Synopsis

Alan Wellbeck (Tim Preece) is a nurse in a mental hospital. His day-to-day struggles with personal feelings and troubled patients provide humour and pathos against the backdrop of a public institution.

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The slow pace of this earnest play provides space for a sense of actual time spent on the ward to be more fully realised in its observance of small moments: banal conversation or institutional ritual. It’s this last that is most effective - Clarke’s spare eye in early evidence - revealing we’re all rather caught in grinding repetition and procedure regardless of which side of the ward door we’re on.